If you’ve ever wondered a great way to monitor progress of your fitness, blood pressure and your BPs response to that stress is a great way to start. I did a pull of a 20 year old male weighing 104KG (229LBS in freedom measurements) and a ceiling of 187CM (6 ft 1 in). This was a SupraMaximal test using a cycle ergometer with a relative VO2max of 28mL/min/kg, which is pretty much expected.
In graph A you will see that the resting BP is 110/70 and the first stage begins at a resistance of 0 watts. Moving to 100 watts at at 2 minutes, the systolic response will increase 28mmHg with diastolic remaining the same. The next stage was sort of surprising with a diastolic increase to 78 and systolic remaining the same at 138. This is interesting because if diastolic increase it will be small like this however it happened early with only 25 being added for 125 watts of resistance. At the end of this stage their resting relative VO2max went from 3.5ml/kg/min to 15ml/kg/min (3.5 is accepted resting just existing as a human value). As the next two stages increase by 25 watts each over two more 2 minute intervals, the diastolic eventually settles back down to 72 while the systolic increases linearly. Typically in elite athletes (especially endurance trained athletes) you’d see the linear increase occur much slower and the O2 uptake would increase however their VO2max would be higher as their body can more efficiently utilize the uptake. You can see at the 13:50 mark max is hit with a systolic of 186mmHg and 72mmHg diastolic.
I’m on my phone and it’s tough to be as detailed as I want to be, but here is a graph.
Attached FileThis graph was also made rather quickly just for this post. I am also interested in the Total Peripheral Resistance (TPR) as this was below average for a sedentary college student.
A decrease in TPR is caused by a decrease in vascular resistance in musculoskeletal vascular beds. The decrease should have a been a bit more and this is an indication of an individual with lower aerobic capacity or an underlying cardiovascular issue, or just overall poor individual fitness.
Attached FileWhy is this important?
It is important if you are wanting to improve your overall cardiovascular performance, enhance your endurance, or need to utilize an exercise prescription to control blood pressure.
It is also a great tool to use to gauge progress. Many times the scale does not tell the whole story. Putting on one pound of muscle mass while losing one pound of fat will not move the scale at all. By getting a baseline of your BP response to exercise and then testing at pre planned intervals, you should see a different SBP response. It will increase linearly with heart rate and intensity however, the increase will be less sharp.